Quotes About Community

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

don't know whether the people in these towns pronounce them that way because they are backward, undereducated shitkickers who don't know any better or whether they know better but don't care that everybody thinks they are backward undereducated shitkickers.

Looked at from above, west London isn't so much a city as a forest with buildings.

Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton

The very first hotel in the world to offer a bath for every bedroom was the Mount Vernon Hotel in the resort community of Cape May, New Jersey.

Beulah has a husband?" "I know. It's a miracle. There can't be more than two people on the planet who'd be willing to sleep with her and here we are both in the same town.

Can we "belong anywhere?" Should we try?

Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)

People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from "Fuhluffia.

Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest—I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People—but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That's not good. Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally

And then you might learn, as we did from a local, that the reason hundreds of starlings in flight will twist and turn in unison is because the ones on the outside are constantly trying to get to the inside where they feel safer. Some

They explained to me that this is simply an affliction of age. The older you get the more it seems the world belongs to other people.

at least thirty-eight theories have been put forward to explain why people took to living in communities: that they were driven to it by climatic change, or by a wish to stay near their dead, or by a powerful desire to brew and drink beer, which could only be indulged by staying in one place.

You can't have a more civilized community than one in which hospital staff play cricket at the end of a summer's day and lunatics can wander and mingle without exciting comment or alarm. It was wonderful, possibly unsurpassable. It really was. That was the Britain I came to. I wish it could be that place again.

Where everyone stinks, no one stinks.

When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa. By Iowa standards, Des Moines is a mecca of cosmopolitanism

Without local newspapers there's no one to tell you when somebody's been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

The tragedy for so many town councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right. But

It was one of the things you put up with: that every Saturday young males trashed your trains, broke the windows of your pubs, destroyed your cars, wreaked havoc on your town centres. I didn't buy it, but it seemed to be so.

the table is among the most important activities in civilization. It is about intimacy, convivium, creativity, appetites, desire, euphoria, culture, and the joys of being alive.

All too often, those who rail against "them" prevail over earnest pleas to remember what "we" can be and do together. Our brains have worked this way for a long time. Maybe they always will. But we have to keep trying. That's the permanent mission our Founding Fathers left us—moving toward the "more perfect union.